Cloaking

Cloaking shows search engines different content than users in order to manipulate rankings. It is considered black hat SEO, violates Google's guidelines and can lead to ranking losses or de-indexing.

Normally, every visitor to a web page sees the same content that the search engine reads. With cloaking, however, Google's crawler is deliberately shown different content than the human visitor. In the past, this was common above all on websites that relied on Flash or large image and video areas: because search engines couldn't do much with them, they were given a text-heavy substitute version. Today, cloaking is mostly used deliberately to deceive – for example, to show search engines a harmless, keyword-optimised text while showing users spam, third-party advertising or even malware.

Cloaking sounds too good for Google to like it

At first glance, cloaking looks like a convenient solution: the crawler gets easily indexable text, the visitor an elaborately designed page. However, Google clearly considers cloaking a violation of its spam policies; it is one of the classic black hat SEO methods. The reason: cloaking was used mainly for deception from early on. Instead of just presenting the same topic in different ways, search engines and users were shown completely different content – for example, children's toys for the crawler and a completely different offer for the visitor. That is not what serious online marketing looks like.

How search engines fight back

Search engines like Google take targeted action against cloaking. Among other things, they also check pages with crawlers and from IP addresses that are not identifiable as Googlebot. This means user-agent or IP cloaking cannot be hidden. If Google detects cloaking, the site faces ranking losses or a manual action, up to complete removal from the index. Such a penalty can only be lifted by removing the cloaking completely and submitting a reconsideration request in Google Search Console – which costs time and visibility. Cloaking is therefore off-limits for professional search engine optimisation.

As Matt Cutts, then head of Google's webspam team, emphasised, there is no such thing as “white hat” cloaking: the crawler should always see the same version of a page as a visitor. Legitimate adaptations that work the same for all users, on the other hand, are not considered cloaking – such as different language versions by location, mobile layouts, personalised product recommendations or paywalls that are correctly marked up with structured data. What matters is that Google is not deliberately shown different content.